A tale of two summits.
Grappa and Nevegàl. It sounds like an old-school cocktail rediscovered by hipsters, but those were our goals, the high points of our loop in the Eastern Alps.
Grappa can mean two things. One is the liqueur derived from the dregs of winemaking, used as paint-stripper or, if necessary, as a drink for humans. The other Grappa is a mountain, a cycling climb, one of Italy’s gnarliest. A staple of the Giro, obligatory pilgrimage for any convert to the religion of pedalling.
Nevegàl is, too, a mountain. An altiplano between Belluno and the Venetian flatlands, a perfect balcony over the Dolomites. There are huts, rifugi, up on the ridge. Places where to have a meal, sleep and, hopefully, wake up to a full view of the spires of the Dolomites right ahead.
Grappa and Nevegàl. Those were our goals.
One year to the dot since our Slovenian foray, Tizzi and I reconvened in Bassano del Grappa on the banks of the river Brenta, right where the fecund Venetian flatlands turn suddenly vertical. Ahead of us was a 200-km loop that would start with Grappa, 1770 metres high, before dropping into Feltre, continuing towards Belluno and ascending towards Nevegàl. Then it was back to base. One beautiful day in August, the heat washed away by a late-summer storm, we set off.
It's funny to say, given how much I’d been looking forwards to this climb, but my strongest memory of that day wasn’t the road to Monte Grappa itself. Granted, there were chills at the sight of the graffiti calling to Pogačar, Roglic and other cycling greats who battled on these hairpins in the Giro, but what stuck in my mind was how surprisingly social the whole affair was.
Normally, cycling uphill is a lonely affair. You, the bike, and the road. The squeaks of the bottom bracket, the pain in your legs, the voices inside your head. On the Grappa, instead, it felt as if we were never alone. Other cyclists shouted encouragements as they bombed down the Cadorna Road; faster riders chatted with us, and before long a peloton of sorts had formed with me up front, Tizzi second and three other brothers in saddle at the rear. A solidarity relay that slingshot us past the villages, through the woods and up, beyond the treeline.
The mountain, here, felt like a Milka chocolate commercial. Endless meadows of soft green grass, golden wildflowers and gurgling streams. The air was fresh, buzzing with bees flying from flower to flower. I decided to push ahead, upping the tempo to tackle the next hairpin and, as soon as I’d gotten past it, everything changed.
The mountain was different. The meadows felt irregular. Sandblasted. Peppered with huge chunks of white limestone. Round ponds filled with brown water lay in the gullies.
A century might’ve passed, but Monte Grappa still bore the scars of when the Savoia and the Hapsburgs sent their youth to kill and die on these mountains.
Back in the autumn of 1917 this was a warzone. Think of the Somme but fought where Stallone filmed Cliffhanger. General Cadorna, known for hating his own men more than the enemy, fed them into a woodchipper over eleven, fruitless battles on the Isonzo. Then the Austrians and Germans unleashed an attack that almost broke the back of the Italian army. With a new frontline on the river Piave, Monte Grappa turned into the keystone of the whole war. One side wanted to occupy it; the other couldn’t afford losing it. As a result, the ridges and cols I was riding on became one of the deadliest places in the planet: for instance, in the 72 hours in November 1918 that sealed Italy’s final victory, 25,000 soldiers were killed or maimed. And that was just for the Italian side.
Today, the Grappa hosts a rifugio and two ossuaries. Clouds rolled in as I climbed the last ramps to the refuge, where dozens of cyclists mingled with hikers in a mood of ebullient jubilation. Things were more subdued further up. The Austro-Hungarian ossuary is first, a small fort with about three hundred tombs flaking two bronze stelae each inscribed with the words Cinquemila ignoti. Ten thousand nameless bodies rest here.
The Italian ossuary is at a stone’s throw. Built in the 1930s, at a time when the country was rapidly forgetting the stupidity of war, it featured all the hallmarks of the Ventennio. Straight lines, chiselled figures, a smattering of cannons. The tombs are arranged as a semi-circular step pyramid, with loculi disposed in alphabetical order. At the end of each line, plaques read Cento militi ignoti.
“What a waste”, I hear a bearded mountain biker say to his cycling mate. I turn towards them and understand. He’s pointing at the tombs. Twenty-three thousand men are buried here, the overwhelming majority unidentified. From Sicily to Bohemia, from Piedmont to Hungary, they were called here because the king in Rome didn’t quite like the chap in Vienna, and viceversa. Twenty-three thousand men. Who knows what they could’ve achieved. They could’ve been Einsteins or cobblers; instead, they never left this mountain.
Back in the refuge a photo of a group of Italian soldiers from the conflict looks over the crowd eating Speck sandwiches and drinking beers. I hear voices in Italian, French, Spanish and German, English as the lingua franca. We talk about bikes with people we’ve just met, exchange tips and ideas. I wonder what those soldiers would’ve made of this scene, right here where they’d been risking life and limb. I’m sure they’d have preferred it to their reality.
Shortly after Belluno the road tilts upwards. We knew it all along, but it was a shock nonetheless. Sixty kilometres of Alpine idyll from Feltre, with little if any climbing, had lulled us in a sense of false security. We had about 20 kilometres ahead of us and 1,200 metres of height gain. In the words of Walter Sobchak, we were entering a world of pain.
The lure of the refuge pulled us up upwards. The ski station has been repurposed to mountain biking, and we looked on with envy as the riders ascended skywards on the gondola, bikes to their side. We, instead, ground on, curved on the handlebars like amanuenses on a codex. Then, when the road degraded into a concrete ramp strewn with rocks, it was time for portage. A fancy term to mean that we had to get off our bikes and start pushing.
There are two kinds of refuges: those that have succumbed to snobbery and elitism and those that embody the spirit of such a place. To offer shelter from weather, welcoming the traveller with open arms, unpretending food and plenty of humour. As luck would have it, Rifugio Bristot was a proud representative of that second category and, within minutes, we had beers in hand and water to clean the mud off our bikes.
Perched atop a grassy ridge descending towards Belluno, the Bristot sat front row before the majestic spectacle of the Dolomites. It was, by then, late afternoon and Tizzi and I basked in the soft light as, one by one, the daytrippers left for the valley floor, leaving just a handful of fellow over-nighters and the three staffers. Silence descended on the mountain, save for the occasional cow bell, the screech of ravens and, from inside the refuge, the faint notes of Bob Dylan. Paradise.
We ate as a group, a bunch of strangers quickly gelling together thanks to the powers of the rifugio. Liqueurs appeared on the table as darkness fell over the valley. Down below, the lights of Belluno shimmered and twinkled, mixing with the flash of lightnings as thunderclouds rolled through the valley. But up here, that night, we live above the weather, snug on our Alpine perch. In that moment, we felt on top of the world.
